Jamie O’Neill and Marie Mullen play well-meaning son and difficult mother in Deirdre Kinahan’s social-problem play The Saviour at the Irish Repertory Theatre.
Deirdre Kinahan’s The Saviour is Irish Repertory Theatre’s second presentation within a year of the “world stage premiere” of a script written for online distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic and now retailored for in-person performance. The previous such work, Tracy Thorne’s Jack Was Kind, was acted as a solo by the author in the Irish Rep’s tiny basement venue in autumn 2022. The Saviour is on the company’s more capacious main stage, giving it a misleading sense of heft. Directed by Louise Lowe, the production features Marie Mullen, a Tony winner for Martin McDonagh’s memorable The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Like Jack Was Kind, The Saviour is a miniature drama intensely focused on up-to-the-moment societal problems.
The Saviour consists of two sections, the first a beautifully written monologue in which an old woman, Máire Sullivan (Mullen), talks to Jesus (yes, the son of God) about the sensual awakening she’s experiencing at the hands of Martin, an offstage character. (“Even the sound of his name,” she coos, “feels delicious.”) Máire recounts her bleak sexual history: an uncle who “used to bother” her in childhood, 42 years with a husband she recalls without rancor but little pleasure, and the “bride of Christ” fantasies of her widowhood. The second, longer section of the play is a combative duologue between Máire and her son Mel (Jamie O’Neill), whose arrival takes her by surprise and enrages her when she realizes why he’s there.
Mullen, a Broadway star since her Tony-winning appearance in The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1998), is giving an emotionally volcanic performance in The Saviour at the Irish Rep. Photographs by Carol Rosegg.
The Saviour features numerous unexpected turns, each strategically disclosed by a playwright who knows how to hold and, when necessary, recapture audience attention. Sorting through recollections of the previous night’s erotic adventure, Máire tells Jesus that sex has “always been a matter of mechanics” for her, “a means to an end,” either “foisted on [her] when [she] didn’t want it or offered for a bit of peace.” Things have changed, she says, in the several weeks since she met Martin, an offstage character who has just left her bed and with whom she believes she’s in love. The “heaving and shunting” of their physical relations, she says, is something new. At the outset, Máire seems merely an eccentric old lady, charmingly crusty, inoffensively profane, her nattering to Jesus a colorful sort of fanaticism. In evenly paced steps of character revelation, playwright Kinahan introduces Máire’s secrets, illusions, and self-delusions, as well as a sense of the pain festering underneath. Máire’s apparent charm is quickly dispelled by her display of ignorance, bigotry, and self-absorption; and she becomes less a protagonist and more a case study in aberrant psychology.
After her mother died, Máire’s father placed her in one of Ireland’s so-called Magdalene Laundries before heading to England for employment. The Laundries, run by nuns, were workhouses where girls and women—pregnant, dissolute, or simply unwanted—were incarcerated without due process for much of the 20th century. Máire entered the Dublin Magdalene Laundry believing she was being enrolled in a boarding school. What she faced instead was enslavement and backbreaking labor, with secrecy strictly enforced (the girls were known by numbers rather than names). “[We] worked in silence. Lived in silence. Silence was our penance … for being orphaned girls. Forgotten girls. Bad girls. Or just … girls.”
Máire struggles to deny the dire news that Mel has brought to her.
Eventually Máire escaped the nuns, though Kinahan doesn’t reveal exactly how. The playwright and Mullen show us what a costly toll her incarceration has taken. “Six years in that hell-hole!” screams Máire. “And not a visit. Not a letter. From Daddy. From anyone. In that place without mercy. That place without forgiveness. Of unbearable judgement. Unbearable heat.” Though she married and raised a family, she is cripplingly self-involved; her judgment about the world and relations with other people is badly impaired. The fact that the history of the Magdalene Laundries has only recently become widely known gives the script a “ripped from the headlines” quality that it shares with Tracy Thorne’s profile of the wife of a politician caught in the headlights of a scandal.
The Irish Rep and Landmark Productions are giving The Saviour a top-notch production, with eye-appealing scenic design and effective lighting by Ciarán Bagnall and a provocative soundscape by Aoife Kavanagh. Mullen’s voluble portrait of Máire, featuring a rollercoaster ride of emotions, makes this an especially noteworthy event, though her artistry (and that of O’Neill, her able co-star) can’t transform a workmanlike script to great art or imbue it with genuine depth. The Saviour, like Jack Was Kind, is an old-fashioned problem play that’s more timely than insightful.
Deirdre Kinahan’s The Saviour runs through Aug.13 at the Irish Repertory Theatre (132 W. 22nd St.). Evening performances are Tuesday to Thursday and Saturday at 7 p.m.; Friday at 8 p.m.; matinees are Wednesday and Saturday at 2 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. For information and tickets, visit irishrep.org.
Playwright: Deirdre Kinahan
Direction: Louise Lowe
Sets & Lighting: Ciarán Bagnall
Costumes: Joan O’Clery
Sound: Aoife Kavanagh
